Part 3

"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to pay attention. He tried to call again, but his mouth dried up and his feet seemed rooted to the ground. For, swinging round the turf-banked corner of the avenue at its junction with another, charging at a terrific pace down upon the little brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a motorcycle, the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its engine's open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor's roar.

*CHAPTER VI*

*SHERBRAND*

The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the crashing collision of earth and metal. Franky, pallid and damp with apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance that Margot was safe and sound. The aeroplane had ceased buzzing and hovering, headed southwards, and floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of her passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash made by the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the greensward, conserved and sacred to the French Republic--the upset machine to which the foot-rest appertained, and an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting in the middle of the raked-up avenue.

"You've had a spill! ..." Franky heard himself saying.

"Yes.... I have had a spill--thanks to that young lady!"

The dusty young man's tone was frankly savage; he regarded the brilliant little figure in the distance with a scowl of resentment as he gathered himself up from the gravel, and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his prominent chin with a handkerchief of Isabella hue. "The brake-handle did that," he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than apologetic Franky's. But he looked full in the flushed and dewy countenance of Margot's lord as he added:

"If I'd killed her, a French jury would have found that she deserved it!--running like a corncrake across the avenue when I was scorching up at top speed! ..."

"I know," Franky stammered. "I--I see how it all happened. You had to steer slap into the bank--to save my--my wife's life. How can I apologise? ... You see, she was crazy about the aeroplane.... She'd been warned to keep well out of the way--you know what women are! ..."

"Oh, as to that! ..." The dusty young man, moving with a perceptible limp, went to the prone motor-cycle, stood it up on its bent stand with one twist of his big-boned wrist, and began to examine into its injuries. "Not much wrong," he said to himself, and straightened his back, and in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky's restraining grip upon his arm.

"You don't go until my wife has thanked you!" Franky's upper-lip was Rhadamanthine. "Margot!" he called, in a tone of authority such as he had never previously heard from his own mouth; "Come here at once, please! I want to speak to you!"

The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him. The gay little voice called back:

"Yes.... Oh!--but look at them! ... Can they be going? Why, I believe they are! ..."

The canvas strips had been rolled up by a mechanician of the Service Aeronautique, and stowed away behind the big grey telegraph-car, in the recesses of which the telescopic steel mast and aerials of the wireless had been snugly tucked away. The mechanics in _kepis_ and overalls had stowed themselves away inside the _camion_; the wireless operator, a kepi having replaced his headband, was acting as chauffeur. And, occupying the front seat beside a junior officer, who piloted a second, smaller car, Raymond, _Capitaine-Commandant pilot_ of the --th escadrille of France's Service Aeronautique gave the signal for departure with an upward wave of his hand. Then, with some sharp, staccato trills of a whistle and the double honk of a pneumatic horn, the car of the commandant turned and sped down the avenue, followed by the tractor-waggon; and both were lost to view.

"But--they're gone! ... And--and the aeroplane...." Margot gasped out the words in amazed discomfiture, sending her eyes after a dwindling shape beating down the sky to the southward, and straining her ears to catch the last of the tractor's whirring song.

"Nearly at Issy, I should calculate--travelling at eighty miles an hour. Impossible now to catch up with her in time to see her do the last stunt. Can choose my own pace for going, anyhow," said the motor-cyclist ruefully. "Nothing left to do but take the Bird over and fly her back to the Drancy hangar."

He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the plucky pretence of indifference. He went on, still doggedly mopping away at his bleeding chin:

"I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the Channel. The bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Frayborough, and as I'd tried him twice already, I knew what _he'd_ got to say. The Commander of the Central School of Military Aviation was a brick--I'll say that for him. He sent a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me in touch with the Inventions Bureau of their _Service Aeronautique_.... Well! the big test's over by this time. I shall know my fate in a week or two--or possibly in a year?"

"Oh! You don't mean----"

The horrified cry broke from Margot. Franky yelled:

"By the Great Brass Hat! ... You're the inventor! The whole thing was your show!"

"Yes, I'm the inventor," the tanned young man in the dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: "What did you take me for? ... A French medical student having a joy-ride, or a _commis voyageur_?"

"Can't say. Never thought! ... Fact is--my wife had frightened me horribly. When your machine bore down on her--posted right in the middle of the gravel--I was scared stiff--give you my honour!--you might have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"

Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.

But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:

"Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the lady. The delay caused by the--mishap can hardly have prejudiced my success. For all I know, the test of my hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges. If it has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or devil, for a failure that may be my own."

He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air, pulled it down, and was in the act of lowering the visor, when Margot's voice arrested the big-boned hand. That voice Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing. It pleaded now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:

"Whether the test is successful or isn't, will you promise that we shall hear from you? ..."

"Good egg!" joined in Franky. "Do let us know! ... We're stopping at the Spitz, Place Vendome." He warmed and grew expansive in the light of Margot's smile of approval. "Drop in on us there," he urged, "as soon as you've found out. Come and dine with us in any case.... No!--we're engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two sharp to-morrow, and tell us all about your hoverer over a bottle of Bubbly. Suite 10, Second Floor. Name of Norwater. Stick this away to remind you," he ended, tendering his card.

"You're awfully good. But at the same time I hardly----"

The voice broke off. A glance at the proffered pasteboard had dyed the inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his dusty gabardine to the edges of his goggled cap. He dropped the card quietly upon the gravel, and said, looking Franky straight between the eyes:

"Even if I were able to accept I'd have to decline your invitation. My name's Sherbrand--I'm your Uncle Alan's son." He settled himself in the saddle and finished before he pulled up the starting-lever. "Understand--I'd no idea who you were until I saw the name on your card. It has been a queer encounter--I can't say a pleasant one. Let me end it by saying 'Good-day!' ..."

Franky's new-found cousin touched the goggled cap and pulled up the starting-lever. With the customary bang and snort, the motor-bicycle leaped away. Margot had uttered a little gasp at the moment of revelation. Now she turned great eyes of dismay on Franky, and withdrew them quickly. For Franky's eyes had become circular and poppy, his mouth tried to shape itself into a whistle, but his expression was merely vacuous. He continued to explode with "Great Snipe!" at intervals, as he and Margot made their way back to more populous avenues, chartered a fortuitously passing taxi, and were driven back via the Porte Dauphine to Spitz's gorgeous caravanserai in the Place Vendome, when Margot vanished into her own bower, sending her French maid to intimate to Milord that Miladi would take tea alone in that apartment, and did not intend to dine.

Thus Franky, relieved from duty, presently found himself, in company with a cigar, strolling bachelor-fashion through the streets of Paris. No very clear recollection stayed with him of how he spent the afternoon. At one time he found himself with his features glued against the plate-glass window of a celebrated establishment dedicated to the culture and restoration of feminine beauty, contemplating divers gilt wigs on stands--porcelain pots of marvellous unguents, warranted to eliminate wrinkles; sachets of mystic herbs to be immersed in baths; creams guaranteed to impart to the most exhausted skin the velvety freshness of infancy.

Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden, full of white statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal seats whereon Burgundian, Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses dandled or rocked or nourished their infant charges, and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of older babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles, or inflated balls of gorgeous hues.

There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout, beribboned wet-nurse suckling her employer's infant. But into the company of these important hirelings came quite unconsciously a young working-woman in a shabby brown merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss. Her shining black hair was uncovered to the sunshine. On one arm she carried a bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing cabbages and onions, and a flask of cheap red wine, which receptacle its owner, having taken the other end of the seat Franky occupied, set down between herself and the young man. She was a healthy, plump young woman with too pronounced a moustache for beauty. But when, having methodically turned the baby upside down to rearrange some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed it and bared her breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through Franky. A dimness came before his vision, and it was as though those dimpled hands plucked at his heart. He suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored. He knew that he longed for a son most desperately. And the devil of it was--Margot did not.

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE CONSOLATRIX*

Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging cloud of thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and presently found himself following a stream of people up a flight of marble steps, and under an imposing portico that ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of Paintings and Sculptures.

Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze, upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.

A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying Ishmael caught his eye as he entered the first gallery. Farther on, Eve after the Fall lifted the infant Cain to receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack of green branches at the end of the labouring day. And a shag-thighed, curly-horned Pan romped with a litter of sturdy bear-cubs, and medallions and panels of childhood were everywhere.

It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting. A Breton christening-party, depicted with the roughness that hides consummate mastery of technique, trudged along a snowy coast-road towards a little chapel near the seashore. The young mother in her winged starched cap and bodice of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked between her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant, chrysalis-like in its linen swaddlings, to be made into a good Christian by M. le Cure. And seated on a broken throne of red granite beneath the towering propylaeum of a ruined Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of lotus columns, and walls painted with processions of hierophants offering incense to bird or beast-headed deities, and bewigged dancers and musicians ministering to the pleasures of long-eyed kings, receded down long perspectives into distance, a Woman, young and slender and draped in a long blue cloak over a white robe, gazed downwards at a naked Child sleeping upon her knees. And about the downy temples of the Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another, more faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother bending above.

Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous blues and emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old Byzantine ornament in relief against a background of dull tawny gold, showed the same maternal figure, far older and in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of wrought ivory upon a dais, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of unfathomable tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted in supplication to that Heaven whither Her Son ascended after His Victory over Death. Across the knees of the Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning mother lay prone and tearless. And at the feet of the Virgin, outstretched amidst the scattered petals of some fallen roses, you saw the nude, beautiful body of a male child of some three years old.

But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great picture filtered through Franky's honest brown eyes to the mind that lay somewhere behind them. But he realised that for the grieving woman who had borne a son and lost him there was no more joy in the world.

The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned her breaking heart had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness of glorious Manhood. But then.... Franky followed the lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil up to the rapt Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and the deep, fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened to Her Son.

"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his teeth. His hand went up, and he had bared his sleek brown head before he knew. This wasn't a Roman Catholic Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even to appear respectful; France had long ago kicked over the traces of Religion--all French people were Freethinkers in these days. Telling himself this, Franky did not replace the shiny topper. One rapid glance to right and left had shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the few visitors it contained were too far distant to have observed the action. Except, possibly, one person, a lean, short, elderly man in shabby black, who stood some paces behind, a little to the left of Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed round-crowned beaver with both hands against his sunken chest as he gazed with bright, absorbed eyes at the wonderful rapt face of the Consoler; his lips moving rapidly as he whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a muscle because Franky had glanced round:

Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered the oddly young eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown, deeply wrinkled visage framed in thickly growing, straight black hair, heavily streaked with white.

"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"

Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured English, with a tone and manner excellently graced. The vivid clearness of his amber-coloured eyes, set in the now smiling mask of walnut-brown wrinkles, was attractive. And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to the look and smile:

"Must say I hardly know. Things that clever, intellectual people go into raptures over, bore me simply stiff. Other things--things they howl down--go straight to the spot, you see. And all I can say when I'm hauled over the coals for liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good enough for this child."

"I comprehend. Monsieur has the courage of his convictions. It is a quality rare in these days. And--this painting particularly appeals to Monsieur? May one be pardoned for asking why?"

The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer. Franky, with an indistinct remembrance of _viva voce_ examinations awakening in him, cleared his throat and fell back a pace or two.... Well set up and well-bred, well-groomed and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other in the priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal coarse ribbed stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella shoes with worn steel buckles, made a contrast sufficiently quaint to provoke a stare of curiosity, had any observer passed just then. But standing together on the beeswaxed floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted gallery, the Guardsman and his temporary acquaintance were as private as it is possible to be in a public place.

Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an occasional stammer, Franky explained himself. The painting appealed to him because it recalled a Bible story--made familiar to Franky by reason of having swotted it at School for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in Greyshott's time. Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's, Last Term, having passed for the Army with the dev--hem!--of a lot of trouble--a beastly epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever having broken out among the children of the Windsor poor, the Head had preached from the text in Big Chapel. And the text went something like this:

"_A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning: Rachel bewailing her children: and would not be comforted because they are not._"

The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture hadn't bucked at the disfigurement and the pain and the danger of child-bearing. She had welcomed them for the sake of the kid.... It was a thundering pity he hadn't lived--in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved to have been let keep that clinking fine boy to rear."

"I comprehend." The clear eyes flashed into Franky's, the withered brown mask was alight with sympathetic intelligence. "To Monsieur, an English officer and a member of the Protestant Church of England, that woman who leans her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of Consolation is Rachel." He quoted:

"'_Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel plorans filios suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt._'"

"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly: "Though I always was a duffer at Latin, and we weren't taught at School to pronounce it--quite in that way."

Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat displayed no edge of linen above the plain circular collar of the soutane, only a significant border of purple from which two widish lappets of the same colour depended beneath the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have been a prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky that the State had abolished the Catholic religion and banished all priests, monks, and nuns from France.

"The Italianate Latin puzzles you.... It is--slightly different to the Latin they taught you at Eton? _Hein_? When I lived in England--not so long ago--I counted several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances. And their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil, Horace, and Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."

He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite gaily as he pulled out a battered little silver snuff-box and helped himself, wrinkling his thin hooked nose with evident enjoyment. As he dusted the pungent brown grains from his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief, an amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and violet in the light.

"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans should be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this tone of the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition. Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."

He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow, and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again into the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:

"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."

"_Hein_? ..."

The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.

"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"

"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you know! ..."

"Yes--yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the stately frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred calling--she is France--our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of the Catholic Church in her bereavement--mourning with anguish unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith, dead to the Spiritual Life--members separated from the Body of Christ by their own choice as by the act of Government. Lost!--unless the ray of Divine Grace find and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent, and turn themselves to Christ again!"

Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:

"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o' view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well chucks a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten about that Religion, don't you know?"

"A whole nation!"

The bright eyes held Franky's sternly. He lifted his right arm, and the withered hand still shut upon the battered snuff-box shot up two fingers in vigorous protest. "Pardon, Monsieur--you are very seriously mistaken. France was never more Catholic at heart than now. How strange!--when but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from Dover--when the Entente Cordiale has established between your country and mine nominally close and intimate relations; that so complete an ignorance as to the French Nation, its Government, its mode of thought, its moral, religious, and social conditions, should be found prevailing in Great Britain to-day!"

"My dear sir, you're off the bull--completely off!" protested Franky--Franky whose second sister was married to a Frenchman, Franky who knew Paris as well as the inside of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!

A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut short the speaker.